If your career was a house, would you feel safe living in it—or are you one storm away from everything cracking? When building a home, nobody starts with the curtains or the artwork. We start with the foundation, then the framework, and only then do we worry about how pretty it all looks. It is exactly the same with a sales or business career. If your foundations are unstable, no script, system, or social media tactic will save you when the market shifts. Over the years in re

If this doesn’t work, what’s your Plan B, and does it scare you enough to get you on the phone today? Have you ever stayed too long in a job or business you absolutely despised? I have. One of my earlier jobs was at the local meat-works. It was cold, messy, physically demanding and—to be blunt—soul-destroying. When they moved me to the slaughter floor, my job was to pull kidneys out of freshly killed, skinned sheep hanging on hooks. It’s not surprising I spent many years as a

You don’t need more inspiration—you need a diary that tells you exactly what to do at 3:00 pm. “Work smarter, not harder” sounds clever, but the truth is most high performers do both. In sales, the person who consistently does more of the right actions will almost always beat the person with the perfect plan that sits in a drawer. When I first stepped into real estate, my manager and I were launching a brand-new office under a big franchise name in a market where that brand h

You don’t have to outrun the bear—you just have to outrun the person next to you. There’s an old story about two CEOs who get air-dropped into a forest with just a backpack of supplies. As they land, they hear a roar—a very angry grizzly bear. One CEO panics. The other calmly takes out his runners and starts putting them on. “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a grizzly bear!” the first one cries. The second replies, “No, but I can outrun you.” That’s competitive advantage.

Every big mistake comes with a bill and a lesson. The trick is making sure you collect the lesson. Once you embrace that learning opportunities often arrive dressed up as mistakes, you stop waiting for the “perfect time” and start taking smarter risks. Without risk, there is no opportunity. But with risk comes vulnerability—to other people’s opinions, and to your own inner critic. At one point, I found myself running three real estate offices, with plans for a fourth and fif

The wrong goal can break you just as quickly as no goal at all. Goals are essential. What cannot be measured cannot be improved. But not all goals are created equal. Some are so “safe” they never stretch you. Others are so unrealistic they quietly destroy your motivation because you’re always behind. When I first sat down with my manager in real estate, he asked what my goal was. Bright-eyed and bushy tailed, I said, “I want to be the Number One salesperson in Ray White SA.”

If you’re always “too busy” but not moving forward, you don’t have a time problem—you have a priorities problem. “Paralysis by analysis” is real. Many capable people get stuck overthinking every move while others, often with less talent, simply get on with it and win. In high-volume, sales-based industries, chasing perfection on every single task can quietly send you broke. Early on, I lost count of how many times new salespeople told me they needed a training session on time

If you lost your business tomorrow, would you still know who you are? “Get a donkey” sounds like strange advice in a sales context, but stay with me. I mean your thing outside of work that grounds you, feeds your soul, and reminds you there’s more to life than your next settlement. For me, it literally became donkeys—two of them, in fact. Running your own business, whether you’re the director or effectively running a business within someone else’s, can be demanding and downri